Sep 3, 2006
Just a random call
Would Yahoo! have become the success it did if it had been called
by another name?
By Frankie Chee
IF FATE had taken a different turn, or the wind blown a little
harder while the coin was turning in the air, we could well be
plugged into the Internet through Packard-Hewlett laptops today,
rather than the more familiar Hewlett-Packard brand.
More than 60 years ago, Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett decided the
name of their company by tossing a coin to decide whether it would
be known as Hewlett-Packard or the other way round.
No prizes for guessing who won. And it isn't the only widely known
brand whose name - now so familiar it's unthinkable that it could
have been anything else - had a random origin.
Some company founders simply took characters or words found in
novels, others used acronyms or played on words.
For example, Yahoo! founders David Filo and Jerry Yang based the
name of their Internet services company on a term used in the
classic book by Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels. It refers to
someone who is repulsive in appearance and action.
Closer to home, the founders of fashion powerhouse Club21, Mr and
Mrs Ong Beng Seng, chose the number because it is lucky when
playing blackjack. Club22 just doesn't have the same ring, does
it?
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How they got their names
LIFESTYLE tells you how some big companies - including those from
Singapore - got their names.
AKIRA: Parent company TT International wanted to start its own
house brand of consumer electronics and asked customers to suggest
a five-letter word with a positive connotation.
TT International settled on Akira, as 'A' is the first letter in
the alphabet, and the name represents brightness and morning
sunshine in Japanese.
COURTS: The furniture giant was named after its founder, Henry
Court.
CLUB21: The owners of the famous fashion name chose the number 21
for its reference to blackjack, taking a bet on its element of
luck.
EU YAN SANG: The name of this company, which distributes
traditional Chinese medicine products, is made up of founder Eu
Kong's name and the words 'Yan' and 'Sang'. The former is a
Cantonese word that means benevolent, kind or humane, while the
latter represents birth, life or livelihood.
GOOGLE: A play on the word googol, which was popularised in a book
called Mathematics And The Imagination. It refers to the number
represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros.
IBM: Started off as International Time Recording Company, which
became International Business Machines, a consolidation of three
subsidiaries, the Computing Scale Company of America, Tabulating
Machine Company and the International Time Rceording Company.
INTEL: Two guys called Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce incorporated N
and M Electronics; the company later purchased the rights to use
the name Intel from IntelCo and Intel (INTegrated ELectronics)
Corporation was created.
MOTOROLA: Paul V. Galvin, the founder of the phone giant, created
the brand by linking motor (for motorcar) with 'ola' (implying the
sound).
Thus Motorola conveyed the idea of sound in motion.
NIKE: Founders Bill Bowerman and Phil Knight began Blue Ribbon
Sports whose athletic footwear was called Nike, after the Greek
winged goddess of victory.
OSIM: The 'O' represents founder Ron Sim's vision of building a
global brand for his company, which makes massage chairs and
distributes health products, while the rest comes from his family
name.
STARBUCKS: Named after the first mate in Herman Melville's classic
whale of a tale, Moby Dick.
YAHOO!: Started out as Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide
Web. The final name Yahoo! is an acronym for 'Yet Another
Hierarchical Officious Oracle', but founders David Filo and Jerry
Yang say they liked the general definition of a yahoo: 'rude,
unsophisticated, uncouth', a term used by Jonathan Swift in his
book, Gulliver's Travels.
Yahoo! itself first resided on Yang's student workstation,
'Akebono', while the software was lodged on Filo's computer,
'Konishiki' - both named after legendary sumo wrestlers.
77th STREET: The founder of this youth fashion chain, Elim Chew,
regards seven as the number for perfection and completion because
in the Bible, God completed creating the world in seven days.
She also says 77 goes well with 'street' and it is a place where
everyday life takes place, and where creative ideas and dreams are
born and take off. 
